: Abandoning a Southern norm in Southern Maryland (original) (raw)

Journal of English Linguistics, 2001

Abstract

A reversal of the Southern US monophthongization of English /ay/ to, e.g., [a:] is reported from fieldwork in Waldorf, MD, a community near Washington, DC, that lies on or near the South/South Midland isogloss according to William A. Kretzschmar et al. (1993) & well within the Southern region according to Hans Kurath & Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (1961). Data consist of word lists, minimal pairs, & personal narratives elicited from white middle-class natives of Waldorf (N = 14 females & 11 males); tokens of /ay/ are coded for Ss' age & sex, presence vs. absence of a glide, stress, language style, & syntactic, morphological, & phonological environments. Results of a multivariate VARBRUL analysis show (1) a strong effect of the following sound, as resonants & voiced obstruents favor monophthongization & voiceless obstruents disfavor it; (2) a steady decrease in monophthongization with successive decades of birth; & (3) a preference for monophthongization among males as opposed to females. The roles of majority forms, marked regionalisms, & phonological simplicity in the actuation of this change are explored.

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